Christian J. Lozano

Susan Delamare

4/15/20

Writing for Engineering

Rhetorical Analysis of a Research Paper in the Field of Engineering

 The reason why I chose this paper written by Mo, Zou, Wang, Lu, 2014 for my rhetorical analysis was that it was about how to improve the cooling of a GPU on a graphics card, which interested me because I have built multiple computers with powerful graphics cards. I found that despite being interested in the engineering field, I do not know as much as I thought I did. Nevertheless, I chose to go with it despite knowing that there would be technical terminology that would be hard for me to understand. The purpose of this rhetorical essay is to break down this complex technical paper to make it easier for readers to digest the information contained by dividing the information into the five aspects of rhetorical analysis: Audience, authors, exigence, conventions, and use of appeals. Meaning that the reader will easily be able to understand what the paper is about, who wrote it, why it was written, why it is structured a certain way, and why this paper is a credible source of information.

           The authors for this paper 2014 are experts in the engineering field, specifically people who study two-phase heat transfer devices and new energy materials as these are the research focuses of the authors. The author with the lowest credentials, Wang Ya-Qiao was still an undergraduate student at the time that this paper was published, so this paper likely targeted people in the engineering field ranging from undergraduate students and above. One of the authors, Mo Dong-Chuan has a Ph.D. while Zou Guan-Sheng is a research assistant with a bachelor’s degree, and Lu Shu-Shen is a professor, and they are all affiliated with Sun Yat-sen University in China. The publisher for their paper is the Taylor & Francis Group, which is a leading publisher in scholarly journals and reference works in many disciplines ranging from the humanities to technology and science (“About Taylor,” n.d).

 Therefore, while this paper was very technical, it was easy enough for people to understand to justify it being something worth publishing in a multidisciplinary journal. In general, this paper only explains what each part does in relation to other parts, but they do not explain the purpose of each individual piece because the authors assume the readers are already familiar with the subject. However, the average person that is really interested in technology can easily understand the purpose of the paper, and for that reason, it is “mildly accessible.” The language itself is simple to follow and considering that there are some errors due to the authors not being native English speakers, the writing itself should not be difficult to understand for most people. Though there are some mathematical equations that many people will not be familiar with if they are not studying in the engineering field. This is one of the limitations of this paper because while the research is interesting and very relevant to modern technology, the average person will not be able to understand this paper. This includes the crude images that describe how the materials work together because they are hard to understand for people not familiar with the components that are part of the machinery.

           The exigence of this paper is to help improve both the cooling of graphics cards and the power efficiency of the cooling machinery itself. Essentially the goal of this research is to provide graphics cards with more cooling for the same amount of power as before, thereby increasing overall efficiency. This is made clear in the abstract that explains the test results and what that means, but it does not explain the relevance to the bigger picture; what’s so important about improving the cooling efficiency of graphics cards? In short, the two companies Nvidia and AMD release new graphics cards every two years or so with minor releases in between with constant improvements in cooling, power efficiency, and overall performance (Glawion, 2020). So, creating a method to improve cooling while using the same amount of power is very important to provide more performance for the same price to consumers. If the paper was in a journal strictly focused on engineering, it might have been fine to leave this information out, but in a multidisciplinary journal, it would make sense to provide readers with more background info to understand the information better.

           Conventions used to organize the paper include IMRaD, which is the division of the paper into the sub-sections of introduction, materials, results, and discussion. The paper is divided up in this manner so that the information contained within is more easily divided up and understood. IMRaD prevents the paper from getting cluttered and incomprehensible because, without all the headings and subheadings, it would be difficult to read even for engineers. This paper does slightly variate from the standard IMRaD format to include a “working principle” section that explains their modification of an already existing product. For the people familiar with the machinery before these authors’ innovation, this is a useful section as many manufacturers of the product can benefit from it. The authors also use CARS to introduce readers to the information contained within the research article and explain their reasoning behind their modification to an existing piece of machinery.

           The use of appeals is strong in this paper. Ethos mainly appears in citations and the acknowledgments because these are where the authors’ names, affiliation, and references are listed. All these things contribute to establishing credibility as they show that the authors have done enough work in their field to be considered experts in the topic of their paper. Logos is mainly used in the materials/method section because that is where most of the reasoning behind the experiment is explained. The materials/method section explains what materials were used and how they were put together to achieve a specific effect that would improve their piece of machinery. The results section serves as a support to the materials/method section because it provides evidence for the reasoning done in the methods section using both writing and visuals to help readers understand the data in the paper. Pathos is not very prevalent in this paper as the authors do not appeal to human emotions at all, even in the conclusion they just explained how their modifications would improve the product without any emotional appeal.

           From analyzing this research paper, I learned that authors that are very experienced in the field sometimes do not think too hard about making their papers accessible to a wider range of people. In the paper I read, some of the figures were simple to understand, while others were too crude and complex for me to understand. I also realized that in these technical papers, knowledge of both advanced math and science are essential to comprehend the contents of these research articles fully. Though, since these research papers can be summarized without all the math equations, I wonder if there is really a point to having math equations in the first place. I also found that papers that do not appeal to pathos are very bland and boring to read because there is nothing that emotionally pushes me to read the paper. Logos and ethos are important, but without pathos, reading through research papers becomes exponentially difficult. Therefore, in the future, I will try and include all three methods of appealing to my audience and also make my writing as easy to understand as possible so that my audience will not need to work so hard to understand my work.

References

“About Taylor & Francis Group.” Taylor & Francis Group, taylorandfrancis.com/about/.

Mo D-C, Zou G-S, Wang Y-Q, Lu S-S. Flat Loop Heat Pipe with Bi-Transport Loops for

Graphics

Card Cooling. Heat Transfer Engineering. 2014;35(11/12):1071-1076.

doi:10.1080/01457632.2013.863095.

Glawion, Alex. “Nvidia Graphics Cards In Order Of Performance.” CG Director, 16 Jan. 2020, www.cgdirector.com/nvidia-graphics-cards-order-performance/.